Citing you on behalf of an other digital geographical imagination

Abstract

In replying to Natalie Oswin’s ‘An Other Geography’, I extend Oswin’s argument for ‘solidarities across modes of difference’ to the place of the scholarly Internet, through the specific case of citation practices. The scholarly Internet—ranging across platforms such as Google Scholar, Socarxiv, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu, to social media including the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—affords new connections and communities, particularly over citations that further give voice to the marginalized, erased, and oppressed of geography that Oswin centers in her article. At the same time, most of these software reproduce whiteness, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, and colonialism in their algorithmic biases. I urge geographers to reconsider their attachments to and expectation of the scholarly Internet, particularly around citation practices. Instead, I call for practices of survival for Others that must necessarily include, in the words of Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, conscientious engagement and disengagement.